GIUSEPPE BONINI
THE WORLDS OF LUCA DALL'OLIO
Luca Dall'Olio's actual research has its roots in experiences that goes back to the time when he went to the Brera Academy of Art. But it was not so much the lessons by Aldo Turchiaro or Gottardo Ortelli to leave an unforgettable impression in the work of the young artist, as from one side the impact with the Milanese metropolis and from the other the pure contrast between this urban dimension and his original places. It is not by a chance that his first convincing proofs around the mid-seventies stopped for a while and looked into the complex and contradictory relation between city and countryside inside our tecnologica' civilization. Anyway it was not a question of a reflexion purely of an ideological sign. Dall'Olio didn't really accentuate any regret of naturalistic order even if it was disappearing during the advancing of the urban civilization, nor did he live in a lyric due his relation with the real.
He preferred the simple but significative comparison between different situations, opening inside the canvas a kind of windows that represented the one and the other reality, foreshortening skyscrapers and angles of countryside landscapes. In everything he conformed the color, already dominant in bis ardent lightings and in that kaleidoscopic shiver that reminded certain pointillistic experiences and that put, at that time like today, in vibration the pictorical surface. The interest in nature and the continuous desire to look into reality, led Dall'Olio at the end of the seventies, to visit other worlds, to immerse in different landscapes.
First it was the mediterranean basin with its blinding light and consequent net chromatic contrasts to be explored; then followed trips to Malaya, Japan, Brazil and Singapore.
Widenings of gentle valleys, barriers of exotic vegetation in which the beloved palmtree stands out, atmospheres enchanted by the thousand chromatic lightings, riverloops and angles of sun-skies become the subjects in the works of the Eighties. The pictures grow without any doubt richer in details, preciousness; the signs get thickener and sketch new plots, any precise reference to reality is going off to be replaced by the same magica' suggestions that it provokes.
Again the meaning of the canvas appears as a space where diversified moments show up, like "an open window over the world"; but now the thing to be represented is not only the universe of the visible. The pictorical weaving procedes in layers, from the bottom upwards, from the left to the right, like a writing-page, like it was structuring an iconical story taking place on two levels, continuously communicating to each other. Compared with what happens in Gauguin, from whom the Brescian artist also learns the decorative components of the pictorical language that lead him to fiatten the space and speak it out with properly figurai artifices, the trip towards other spaces is an escape from reality, that doesn't only mean a research of a mythic primitivity, but rather an abandonment to the movements and dimensions in dream. Dall'Olio defines himself "an unexhausted traveller", but if his exploration moves from the observation of reality, this will bave a value at the time it is transformed during a descent inside one's own ego. Painting becomes a language of mind. Following the thin thread of remembrance, that confuses and stratifies, the states of mind experienced in front of an uncontaminated nature and the new sensations that their emergence stimulate, the artist projects in the space of the canvas all this sedimentated during his explorations that from having been physical become mental. And from the deepness of the imaginary on the scene burst symbols and archetypes, rests and fragments of atavic scripts, oneiric visions and fragments of reality able to evoke with their dimensions without time and their mediterranean light, fable-landscapes in which once again immerse oneself. On the other hand for Dall'Olio the entire reality appears in continuous "formativity", in which the complex cosmological meaning that this very same term assumes in Klee, although the presence of certain microorganisms, almost cellular figures, seems to remind the late Kandinsky or the "naturalistic" Arp. E very form seems to generate others and these in their turn, allude, suggest, postpone. For this sake the artist persists very much on the broken lines and gives special importance to contours - that binds up even distant realities. Maybe the world under earth, that hidden, the unconscious, the "feeling" of the reality on the surface, of the visible, the natural, like the often recurring figure of the tree, always the symbol of conjunction between sky and earth, between universe of the ultra sensitive and the terrestrial world.
Giuseppe Bonini